


and now whatever way

by ice_connoisseur



Series: it well may be [2]
Category: NCIS
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-19
Updated: 2016-05-19
Packaged: 2020-10-04 20:54:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20477318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ice_connoisseur/pseuds/ice_connoisseur
Summary: Tony's decision regarding the Rota promotion goes a different way.





	and now whatever way

**Author's Note:**

> This one is…less complete. It’s a skeleton. At one point there were several more scenes planned and a lot more fleshing out intended for what was written. Bits of it are little more than plotting dialogue. And it doesn’t so much end as just…stop. There were whole chunks of Tony and Gibbs hashing through the fallout of Gibbs’ abandonment, Tony and Ziva putting the piece back together post-Somalia, McGee and Tony growing into themselves with the space of an ocean to do so. The Port to Port killer did not feature because…no.
> 
> Quick re-cap; in early season four Gibbs returns from his “retirement” in Mexico and Tony, having effectively led the team for the last few months, gets offered a promotion to team leader at the Rota office. He turns it down and the job instead goes to EJ Barrett, who is in turn reassigned to Washington with the rest of the team from Rota mid season eight. This is a spotted tale of what might have happened if Tony had made a different choice.

He breaks the news over cold coffee and end-of-case paperwork. 

“I’ve been offered a promotion.”

No one says anything for a very long moment, and since he’s started, he might as well finish. 

“It’s in Rota. Spain. Sun and Senoritas. I’ll have my own team.” 

McGee’s lips part slightly, the beginnings of a _but _on the tip of his tongue, before he locks them firmly shut. 

It doesn’t matter. _We’re your team_ is written all over his face, seeping into the glance he suddenly shoots in Gibbs direction. 

“You taking it, DiNozzo?” asks Gibbs levelly and there’s nothing there, no anger or hurt or anything even approaching an apology, and so he just swallows once and nods. 

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I mean, who knows when an opportunity like this will come again?” 

Gibbs shrugs. “Congratulations, then,” he offers, and turns back to his computer.

* * *

He does it properly. Sorts his apartment, fills in all the paperwork, buys little presents to hide for Abby to find once he’s gone. 

And it’s _horrible_. 

Abby cries like he’s dying, not just moving to a different continent, and Ducky shakes his head sadly while McGee wanders round like a puppy that’s been kicked and Ziva folds in on herself like he’s not seen her do in months. 

He refuses to just up and leave with a few cryptic comments and no indication of when or if he’s coming back, he _will not_ do that to them again, but some days it takes every inch of his will power to avoid giving in to the temptation to drop everything and just go. It’s what he’s always done before.

Gibbs doesn’t do anything. Tony’s not even sure he’s noticed he’s leaving.

* * *

McGee comes over a week before he’s due to leave. They sit amongst the packing crates with takeout and beer and get magnificently drunk. For a while they joke and rib each other, but somewhere between McGee’s third attempt to throw an empty carton into the bin and his fifth rendition of how much his hand-eye-coordination is improving, it really is, Tony suddenly slumps back and says, “God, I wish Kate were here.”

McGee comes back to earth with a bump. 

“Me too,” he sighs.

“No, I mean, I always do, but now I really, really do. This would be a lot easier if Kate were here.”

McGee squints at him, confused. 

“She’d have come with me, see?” Tony explains tiredly, vaguely aware that only alcohol could make him share such a thing. “I’ve been going over the staffing in Rota and they’re woefully undermanned and under experienced. Kate would have come and been my second.”

McGee tries very hard not to let the hurt show on his face. He fails.

“Oh, Probie, don’t look at me like that. I can’t ask you.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll say yes.”

“And you don’t want me to come.”

“Of course I want you to come.”

“So why?”

Tony laughs hollowly. “You want to be the one to tell Abby we’re both going?”

Ah. McGee shudders at the thought. 

“And Ziva’s position is tenuous enough as it is, I don’t want to draw attention to her by requesting she transfer. But if Kate were here, she could have come, and you and Ziva would still be here, or you could have come, and Kate would have stayed, but either way, I wouldn’t have…”

Wouldn’t have been completely tearing the team apart, he doesn’t say, and McGee understands, finally. It’s not for Abby, not really, though maybe a little bit. McGee has seen how Tony’s been hovering around their returned boss, barely-concealed concern, and he can’t help but puff with pride a little at the thought that he’s only going because he trusts _him_, Timothy McGee, to pick up the slack. 

A bigger it of him wishes he didn’t have such faith, and a huge bit of him is suddenly terrified at letting him down.

“Kate would have gone,” he assures the older agent instead. “Me, too.”

Tony grins. “Nah. You’re better off here anyway. And hey, now you get to be Gibbs Senior Field Agent. I’ve heard it’s a pretty prestigious role.”

McGee sighs and shakes his head. “I’ve never wanted that,” he mumbles quietly. “I always thought there was only one way it would ever happen, and I never wanted to be Gibbs’ senior agent.”

The inflection isn’t lost on either of them. 

* * *

The first thing he does when he arrives, once his computer is out and hooked up to a rather dodgy dial-up connection, is sit and type each of them an email. Nothing fancy, just a few lines each, but it’s not the contents, it’s the thought behind them.

He’s not dropping off the face of the planet. He may be a bit further away, but he’s still just the other end of a computer.

Email follows email without fail for the next two years. 

* * *

The first time he comes back to the states is for Jenny’s funeral. Ziva had rung him with the news, her voice hollow and very far away over the tinny line. 

Suicide. It hadn’t made sense, not at first, not for _her, _until Ziva had explained. 

She’d been dying. Slowly and painfully, and Jen Shepard was never meant to go quietly. 

That wasn’t to say she’d made a big show of it; maybe it was one final act of consideration, maybe it was vanity, but she’d done it quietly and calmly in her home study, swallowing the pills with a neck of bourbon. 

Tony was kind of grateful he hadn’t been there to see the expression on Gibbs’ face when Ducky had told him that. 

He stays with McGee.

* * *

“There’s a call for you upstairs, Agent DiNozzo,” the pretty technician says with a smile he responds to almost automatically. “The MCRT in DC."

The smile slips somewhat to be replaced with honest surprise. It is rare for his team – his _old_ team, he amends crossly, because after three years he’s been without them for almost as long as he was with them – to use MTAC to contact him. Abby and McGee both webcam, often at the same time, while Ziva calls him once a fortnight, and sends emails in the meantime, tersely worded but teasing, and Ducky sends his good wishes with them all.

Gibbs doesn’t contact him. He doesn’t expect him to.

And yet there he is, filling the screen, glaring at the camera in a way that’s so achingly familiar he has to catch the automatic cry of _Boss_! at the sight of him. 

“Gibbs!” he greets instead, letting his pleasure at the contact show in his tone, because three years is a long time and he really is happy to see him. “Long time no speak. And Probie too! I take it this isn’t a social call? What can sunny Spain do for you?”

Later, he’ll blame the fuzzy connection for why he didn’t see the look in Gibbs’ eyes sooner. When he does, Tony’s heart sinks like a stone to settle somewhere round his stomach, because that last time he saw his boss look like Kate’s blood had still been warm on his face.

“It’s Ziva,” whispers McGee, his voice cutting through the static like a whip. “She’s…she’s dead.”

* * *

They protest that it’s not necessary, that it’s out of his jurisdiction, that anyway, they’re not really sure if they’re even right, and if they are then there’s still no need for him to leave his team. They can handle it.

“I don’t care.” he says flatly. “I’m coming with you.”

“DiNozzo! You have your own team to think about, your own responsibilities…”

“You think I don’t know that?” he snaps back, because really, who is Gibbs to lecture him about his team, his responsibilities?

“We’ve got it covered.”

“Yeah? You and McGee in the desert, that’s really gonna work. You need me for this one boss.”

“I’m not your boss.”

“But Ziva was my partner! You’re saying that if something had happened to Jenny after Paris, you wouldn’t have dropped everything in a _second_?”

“That’s different!” insists Gibbs, but he falters as he says it, because he’s never been quite able to pin down exactly what happened between the two of them that summer he was in Mexico. 

“Bull!”

He’s angry, angry at everyone. Gibbs, for losing her, McGee, for telling him, Ziva, for dying.

Himself, for not thinking anything of it when she’d phoned him a few months before, sounding small and very far away down the phone.

_I’m back with Mossad,_ she’d said, and maybe if he’d stayed in DC he’d have understood better just how much that would have cost her, _Just for a little while. I had a friend, he was working on something, and now he’s dead I need to finish it. It shouldn’t take long, but you might not hear from me for a couple of months. Don’t worry._

He had, of course, but only in a distant, I-really-hope-Ziva’s-not-killing-anyone-she-shouldn’t-be-killing sort of way. 

He should have known not to put so much faith in the love of a man who sent his daughter to kill his only son. Of course Eli David wouldn’t be enough to keep Ziva safe.

* * *

He goes. Of course he goes, there was no way it was going to be otherwise. Tied to a chair in the middle of the African desert, he weaves a tale that sort of was and mostly wasn’t, and aches for home in a way he hasn’t since his first week on Spanish soil. 

* * *

He uses up six weeks of leave and stays in America when they return from Somalia. He sleeps on Ziva’s sofa, at first because she’s too out of it to even notice and then because she’s too out of it for him to dare risk leaving her alone. As she recovers, they settle into a routine, of breakfast and errands and physio appointments and dinner and movies. It’s familiar and comfortable, like that summer after Gibbs disappeared to Mexico when she seemed to be the only thing holding him together, but safer too, grounded by their years of friendship and the knowledge that there is nowhere one can go without the other following. It’s easy, too easy, to forget that he has to leave, eventually.

He drives her to work on her first day back, and it takes every ounce of willpower he has not to follow her into the building. 

It’s time to go back to Spain.

* * *

He doesn’t tell them. At first it’s because he’s not entirely sure if it’s even happening, and then it’s because he’s not sure if he’s going to do it, and by the time he’s pretty sure that yes, this is it, he’s a week away from US soil and getting giddy every time he thinks of the look on Abby’s face when she sees him. 

Walking into the bullpen it’s almost like the last four years never happened. Nothing’s really changed; the walls are still the same shade of orange, the air still buzzes with the smell of coffee and sweat. And in the little patch they call their own, his team are there, gathered round the plasma with their backs to him. Ziva is rattling off a list of names, McGee is flipping through the relevant pictures, and Gibbs is glaring at the pair of them with his usual _get to the point _expression, so he sneaks up behind them.

“The wife did it,” he says casually. “Haven’t you guys worked that out by now? It’s always the wife.”

McGee drops the mouse with a squeak and Ziva throws her arms around him in a manner that makes him think she’s been spending far too much time with Abby, but it’s Gibbs he looks to, and damn, if there isn’t an actual smile on his face too. 

**Author's Note:**

> To clarify, my intention isn't that Tony returns to the team proper, a demotion in every sense of the word. 
> 
> No, he and Gibbs sit back to back in the bullpen, but that doesn’t mean they see eye to eye on everything, and maybe he does enjoy winding him up by monopolising Abby’s time a little bit too much, but hey, no one else would get away with it. McGee slides neatly across, straddling two teams for a while, but Tony’s six was the position he’d been training for since the day they met. Ziva stays put and they fill the other desks, and mostly they work separately but when help is needed, it is kinda nice to just have to poke a head over the divide rather than patch a call across an ocean. 
> 
> And that was how this one was meant to end.


End file.
